This image of thousands of newborn stars is composed of new observations from the American X-ray telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory and previously released data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The star cluster NGC 602 surrounded by dust clouds extends about 175 light years (a light year is about 9,460,000,000,000 kilometers) and is located somewhere in a remote corner of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy of ‘our’ Milky Way. The cool thing about these newborn stars (shown as blue, red, and yellow dots) is that they’re ideal for astronomers to learn something about what star formation looked like in the early universe.
The distance of this star cluster – 200,000 light years – is still quite close for astronomers and with an age of about five million years, the stars are relatively young. Presumably, new stars are still being formed in this cluster and – just like in the early universe – there is little material around to form the stars.
Stars form over hundreds of thousands of years in enormous, cold clouds of gas and dust, sometimes hundreds of light-years wide. Some parts of the cloud in which matter clumps due to cold, collapse under their own weight. These collapsing parts become increasingly compact and hotter.
When the temperature and pressure are high enough, nuclear fusion occurs: nuclei of light elements fuse into heavier ones. This releases an extremely large amount of energy, which provides enough counter pressure to prevent the area from further collapsing. The hot sphere, the new star, ends up in an equilibrium between the inward gravity and outward radiation pressure. For millions to billions of years, until the star burns out.
In the stars in this photo, nuclear fusion has still been going on for a relatively short time, in other words: not so many light elements have yet been converted into heavier ones. That makes its composition very different from, for example, that of the much older sun, and more like that of stars from billions of years ago in the young universe.
In red are X-rays captured by Chandra, which are emitted by young stars. The circle in blue, green and orange consists of dust clouds, illuminated and heated by the young stars, and comes from JWST data. Some stars have six radii, an artifact created by the hexagonal shape of the JWST mirrors.